8 Must-Read Books on Business Strategy
Getting strategy right is key to success. A good strategy is essential for companies and start-ups to maintain competitive advantages in order to survive. We’ve collected the best books that will explain the basic foundations of a business strategy, help you to learn what’s a good (and a bad) strategy, and give you plenty of real-world examples.
Good Strategy Bad Strategy
The Difference and Why It Matters
by Richard Rumelt
Why read?
This book clears out the mumbo jumbo and muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world.
Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader, whether the CEO at a Fortune 100 company, an entrepreneur, a church pastor, the head of a school, or a government official. Richard Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” He debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.”
322 pages, Profile Books 2017
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Your Strategy Needs a Strategy
How to Choose and Execute the Right Approach
by Martin Reeves, Knut Haanaes and Janmejaya Sinha
Why read?
In this book, The Boston Consulting Group’s Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs, and Janmejaya Sinha offer a proven method to determine the strategic approach that is best for your company. They start by helping you assess your business environment — how unpredictable it is, how much power you have to change it, and how harsh it is — a critical component of getting strategy right. They show how existing strategy approaches sort into five categories — Be Big, Be Fast, Be First, Be the Orchestrator, or simply Be Viable — depending on the extent of predictability, malleability, and harshness. In-depth explanations of each of these approaches will provide critical insight to help you match your approach to strategy to your environment, determine when and how to execute each one and avoid a potentially fatal mismatch.
288 pages, Harvard Business Review Press 2015
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Blue Ocean Strategy
How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant
by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne
Why read?
In this perennial bestseller, embraced by organizations and industries worldwide, globally preeminent management thinkers W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne challenge everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success. The authors argue that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves (spanning more than 100 years across 30 industries), the authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors but from creating “blue oceans” — untapped new market spaces ripe for growth.
320 pages, Harvard Business Review Press 2015
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Competing Against Luck
The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice
by Clayton M. Christensen, Karen Dillon, Taddy Hall and David S. Duncan
Why read?
After years of research, Christensen and his co-authors have come to one critical conclusion: our long-held maxim — that understanding the customer is the crux of innovation — is wrong. Customers don’t buy products or services; they “hire” them to do a job. Understanding customers does not drive innovation success, he argues. Understanding customer jobs does. The “Jobs to Be Done” approach can be seen in some of the world’s most respected companies and fast-growing startups, including Amazon, Intuit, Uber, Airbnb, and Chobani yogurt, to name just a few. But this book is not about celebrating these successes — it’s about predicting new ones.
This book carefully lays down the authors’ provocative framework, providing a comprehensive explanation of the theory and why it is predictive, how to use it in the real world — and, most importantly, how not to squander the insights it provides.
288 pages, Harper Business 2016
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Good to Great
Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t
by Jim Collins
Why read?
Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years.
The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good?
Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness — why some companies make the leap and others don’t.
The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice.
315 pages, Harper Business 2011
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Playing to Win
How Strategy Really Works
by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin
Why read?
Strategy is not complex. But it is hard. It’s hard because it forces people and organizations to make specific choices about their future — something that doesn’t happen in most companies.
Now two of today’s best-known business thinkers get to the heart of strategy — explaining what it’s for, how to think about it, why you need it, and how to get it done. And they use one of the most successful corporate turnarounds of the past century, which they achieved together, to prove their point.
272 pages, Harvard Business Review Press 2013
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The Art of Strategy
A Game Theorist’s Guide to Success in Business and Life
by Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff
Why read?
Game theory means rigorous strategic thinking. It’s the art of anticipating your opponent’s next moves, knowing full well that your rival is trying to do the same thing to you. Though parts of game theory involve simple common sense, much is counterintuitive, and it can only be mastered by developing a new way of seeing the world. Using a diverse array of rich case studies―from pop culture, TV, movies, sports, politics, and history―the authors show how nearly every business and personal interaction has a game-theory component to it. Mastering game theory will make you more successful in business and life, and this lively book is the key to that mastery.
512 pages, W. W. Norton & Company 2010
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The Art of the Long View
Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World
by Peter Schwartz
Why read?
What increasingly affects all of us, whether professional planners or individuals preparing for a better future, is not the tangibles of life — bottom-line numbers, for instance — but the intangibles: our hopes and fears, our beliefs and dreams. Only stories — scenarios — and our ability to visualize different kinds of futures adequately capture these intangibles.
In The Art of the Long View, now for the first time in paperback and with the addition of an all-new User’s Guide, Peter Schwartz outlines the “scenaric” approach, giving you the tools for developing a strategic vision within your business.
272 pages, Currency 1996
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